10/01/2009 @ 6:00PM

Transcript: Catalyst For Change

The U.N. has a number of huge missions assigned to it by the nations of the world. And there’s no way the U.N. can do all of these things by itself. So, it is our job to do two things. One, to try to strengthen the U.N.’s capacity to take on and achieve these missions. But maybe more importantly, to bring in all kinds of other resources from the outside. You know, there’s expertise in the business community, there is, obviously, finance in various places in the world. There are non-governmental organizations that really want to work with the U.N., find it difficult to get the right portal to deal with, so we know a lot about the U.N. So we’re, in many ways, a kind of a broker or a catalyst for bringing the expertise of the world into the U.N. to help the U.N. reach its extraordinary mission statement. To help them do what they’ve been asked to do.

To give you an example, malaria. Malaria’s been the largest killer in the world, way beyond AIDS. There’s a huge focus on AIDS, but malaria’s the silent killer around the world. Well, nobody thought malaria could be taken on, they sort of threw up their hands. And a number of people, a number of private sector groups, got together, organized a mission and said, “Why can’t we do this?” People have taken various parts of the mission. The part that we’ve taken on is the purchase of bed nets. You know, if you can get people to sleep under a bed net, mosquitoes bite at dawn and at dusk, and that’s when you’re most vulnerable. So, if you’re sleeping under a bed net, then your chances of your being protected against malaria go up by 90%. So, we have developed a program where for $10 Americans all over the country, have had the opportunity, we’ve run campaigns in 12 or 15 cities, we’ve had a major program called Nothing But Nets. So, in doing that, we’ve also recruited the NBA. They thought this was a great idea.

There was a writer for Sports Illustrated that really had the name, “Why don’t we people who do sports do something about nets?” And so, we saw that, and wow, we picked it up, and that became the theme, Nothing But Nets. So we had the WNBA, the NBA, the National Hockey League, Soccer League and so on, all involved in Nothing But Nets. So this campaign has really grown significantly. And again, we’ve been the broker and the catalyst for that citizen action, citizen engagement, solving the problem, helping to pull together all the private sector partners to take on this huge public health problem, which the U.N. has been trying to tackle through its own agencies.

The Poorest Of The Poor

Well, the U.N.’s real mission relates to people. I mean, its job is to think about particularly poverty and development and how you deal with the poorest of the poor and the people who have really been victimized by various political developments around the world. I’ll give you another example of if we do bed nets, then we said, “Well, where’s the biggest problem?” Well, the biggest percentage of infection occurs in refugee camps.

You know, there are about 20 million people living in refugee camps today. So, what we’ve done is to work with the U.N. Refugee Agency through Nothing But Nets and supplied bed nets to hundreds of thousands of refugees in these camps. And then the issue was, “Well, what else is going on in refugee camps?”

I was in a big refugee camp in Goma, just east of Rwanda in Congo, just sort of, really, the heart of darkness, some of the most terrible conditions anywhere in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the women in that refugee camp were pregnant, or had just had a child. I mean, these are women who are victimized, and it’s just a terrible situation. So we’re now latching up with UNHCR and a whole family planning community, a women’s reproductive health care community, to provide assistance through the U.N. to the women living in that refugee camp, just on that very targeted area, helping women to protect themselves.

I mean, it’s a huge problem, and it’s one that gets lost. You know, nobody really thinks about that. People who live in refugee camps are truly marginal citizens. And women get marginalized in a marginal situation. I mean, it’s a terrible situation. So we’re honing right in on that and you wake up in the morning and say, “Well, maybe I did some good today.” You know, and people feel that way. We’re going to give Americans the opportunity to participate, as they did in the refugee camps for bed nets. Now, they will help provide reproductive health care services and supplies to women who are getting victimized by the millions in these refugee camps.

Plugging Into Networks

So, I’m standing at this session, and this young guy comes up to me, he’s my children’s age, you know, younger. And he says, “You know, I’m the international vice president of Google.” And I said, “All right, what do you do?” No, Facebook. International vice president of Facebook. He comes up to me and he says, “You know, I’ve been watching what you guys do on your Web site, and I think we can help you.” I said, “Great, we’re always looking for as much help as possible.” I’m about as techno-modern as nobody. I mean, I just listen to these kids, and whatever they say, I’m ready to try to do. And so, what he wants to do is to help us in terms of networking all his social networks.

And how do you take problem and get this more engaged in a social network? How can Facebook help? So, there were a couple of our people that were there, at the meeting, so I got them together so we’ve been nibbling around the edge of doing this, trying to figure out how to do this more effectively, got some very good people working for us doing it. But here’s the guy who’s probably got the central institution now for working on it, so we’re going to go and see if this, we can take our bed net example, you know, people like the idea of bed nets. Well, what are the other items around which we can create a community of interest?

Can we do that on cook stoves, for poor women in Africa? Can we do that on reproductive health care issues? Are there other health care issues that we can do that on? Are there ways in which some solar solutions we can do that? You know, there are a number of ways in which we try, so you know, we’re trying to plug into these new networks as best possible, and it’s not exactly my long suit, but it is something that I think is so promising and we want to be able to open ourselves up, as an institution and be as aggressive about that as we can.

What Can I Do?

You know, the point that you make is a lot of these issues seem so big and so abstract. They’re up there at 60,000 feet. Well, all of us live at ground level. You know, and how do you bring that down so that people can understand climate change, and what do I do? You know, people can understand global poverty and what do I do? People can know that there are a lot of people desperately poor around the country, around the world, what do I do? We know women get victimized all of the world, what do I do? You know, people want to engage.

And that’s, I think, going to be the greatest contribution of the Internet in this day and age. How do we link people so that you link people with their interest, with a problem, and doing something about it? That’s sort of our own supply chain, you know, that to deal with these issues and we’re learning how to do that, and it’s very promising. That’s very exciting.